Any reader of Marilynne Robinson’s extraordinary works of fiction has
experienced how marvelously she explores the mysteries of human existence on—as
she calls it in her new work of nonfiction, Absence of Mind—our “tiny,
teetering, lopsided planet.” Robinson is fascinated with consciousness and with
the mind’s place in the universe, and her novels open readers to the worlds
within the world of each of her characters’ particular corner of the swirling
cosmos. In Absence of Mind, Robinson addresses these issues directly,
confronting the mind head on and arguing for its existence as an entity much
larger and more elusive than any merely biological or evolutionary function.

Written in four parts and commissioned for the
Dwight Harrington Terry Foundation Lectures on Religion in the Light of Science
and Philosophy, Absence of Mind has a clear mandate and agenda. The
Terry Foundation’s “deed of gift” states its desire that through its series of
lectures “the Christian spirit may be nurtured in the fullest light of the
world’s knowledge,” and while Robinson allows for an expansive and encompassing
conception of Jewish, Christian, and other spiritual wisdoms and philosophies,
her objective is certain. A believer in both scientific inquiry and religious
mystery, she wishes to reconcile what many on both sides of the
science/religion debate see as irreconcilable, but rather than actually
pursuing such a course, her book takes the stance of a factious attack on what
she refers to as “the closed circle that is called modern thought.”

Railing against positivism, behaviorism,
neo-Darwinism, Marxism, and Freudianism, Robinson points out how each of these
systems of thought not only offers an incomplete view of the world, but also
how incompatible they are with each other when taken as a whole and accepted as
a collective view of modernity. One of her most salient criticisms is in
pointing out the fallacy of what she describes as a key dictum of each of these
systems: “the notion that we as a culture have crossed one or another threshold
of knowledge or realization that gives the thought that follows it a special
claim to the status of truth.” Although the discoveries of Galileo, Darwin, and
Einstein certainly cross thresholds toward a more workable model of truth,
Robinson rightfully questions the common contemporary mindset that holds that
we were in error before a certain moment and only now we see clearly. This has also
been the mindset of many of the world’s religions and metaphysical
philosophies, however, and in honoring their valuable insights and wisdoms,
Robinson somehow fails to mention their own exclusionary claims to veracity.

Leaving the poets and saints and mystics undisturbed,
Robinson’s main targets in Absence of Mind are contemporary writers such
as E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and Daniel Dennett—writers
whom she characterizes as taking a derisive stance toward religion and whom she
derisively labels as “parascientific.” One of her repeated methods of refuting
them is to call into question the very character of their thought, and many of
her arguments consist of choosing a vulnerable sentence in their books (and in
the case of Rorty and Vattimo’s The Future of Religion, an introduction
written by the book’s editor) and dismantling, discrediting, or lampooning it.
At one point, she even refers to an author’s colloquial explanation of altruism
(which is one of Robinson’s main arguments against neo-Darwinism) as
“sophomore-speak.” While her own prose is high-handed, one of the great
disappointments of Absence of Mind is that Robinson fails to dazzle the
reader with the flights of insight that this book’s subject matter should have
generated in a writer of such talent and profundity, instead maintaining the
cold and inelegant register of a defensive (and often offensive) polemicist.
This hardly seems the work of the author whose first novel, Housekeeping,
inspired a generation of writers to pursue the marvels of both the world and
the word.

The greatest contribution of Absence of Mind comes
in the book’s third chapter, “The Freudian Self,” in which Robinson
recontextualizes Freud and his times in fascinating detail and with an
extraordinary command of how Freud’s works interacted with the worldviews that
surrounded and inspired his own. Her ultimate aim in this section is to negate
certain Freudian and post-Freudian concepts that in her view discount the idea
of the individual mind living in an individual time, and with a deftness of
thought and knowledge and style, she largely succeeds, turning her
double-negative approach into a positive contribution to Freudian criticism, as
well as to the ongoing exploration of how the mind exists in time. Whether you
find yourself agreeing or arguing with Robinson’s conclusions (or agreeing and
arguing with them), this is a classically rigorous and beautifully hewn
essay that—like much of Freud’s best writing—is valuable both as an
intellectual artifact to be pondered and confronted and as a work of literary
artistry.

Despite its overall tone of enmity—and despite its
hand-wringing apprehension that our existence is being impoverished by the
perils of “modern thought”—Absence of Mind makes a positive and often
successful effort at showing us how both science and the mind are far more
expansive and inexplicable than many schools of thought would have us believe.
It may be unfashionable to think of the mind as a mysterious entity that exists
as something much larger than our already large brains, but when Robinson
delves into the farthest interior and exterior worlds and drops her offensive
defensiveness, she reveals in herself a mind that serves as a living example of
many of her best points. Perhaps few will be convinced by this book—its
arguments are couched in terms more suitable to those who will probably
disagree with it, while most sympathetic readers will be turned away by its
antagonistic tone—but Robinson’s learning in all the fields she discusses is
remarkable, and her ideas will certainly impress themselves upon the mind of
any serious reader, regardless of whether that mind decides to let itself be
changed.